Reading Ron Silliman's blog. Ron's poetic seems to stand on a series of dichotomies:

political right vs. left
traditionalist poetry vs. experimental
conservative religious culture vs. Enlightenment neo-modernism
new formalism vs. post-avant
mainstream vs. oppositional poetries
"School of Quietude" vs. "post-Language"

(some of these are different terms for the same thing.)

He writes today about reconstructing a non-totalitarian modernism as a basis, it seems, for contemporary aesthetics/poetics.

It seems to me that what these dichotomies tend to do (& I've said this before) is fortify a system of barriers between poetry as oppositional subculture, and the public at large. In this schema, the most advanced, self-conscious aesthetics appears to be a neo-modernist autotelic space - free, self-determining & politically resistant.

I think it's fair to say this is a pretty common perspective among the experimentalists of recent decades.

I don't want to try to challenge this viewpoint today (at least any more than I already have). I only want to say, again, how forcefully it strikes me, that my trajectory in poetry for the past 30 years seems to deny or negate these dichotomies. I'm the conjunction of Ron's opposites. I'm the neo-modernist post-avant left-aesthete's worst nightmare.

On the other hand, one can admire & love the strange elegiac feeling of "Swamp Formalism", and imagine Lisa Jarnot actually responding with rueful self-disgust to the "poetic" improvisatory talent (like her own, the unacknowledged legislator) of Rumsfeld-in-action (at the news conferences). (I think the feeling is similar in "Land of Lincoln"; maybe I'm fooling myself.)

What bothers me is the dumbing-down of speech into a special idiom. All poetry is a special idiom, but if it's too obvious, you show your hand - ie. it becomes rhetoric. (Ron Silliman's pretentious syllable-counting only underlines - unintentionally - the artificiality, the mannerism, of the technique.) Incantantory, neo-romantic, poetical. . . & overly rhetorical. (Gabe Gudding - who believes that poetry is rhetoric - would disagree.)

Startling to read Ron Silliman's encomium for Lisa Jarnot's poem, "Swamp Formalism", dedicated to Donald Rumsfeld, and then to listen to NPR's report on a new cd of "art songs" composed to the text of a tongue-in-cheek but faithful volume of the "poetry of Donald Rumsfeld" (an assemblage of his press conference statements, versified). (I don't recall the name of either compositor or composer, sorry.)

Here is the Jarnot poem:

Swamp Formalism

for Donald Rumsfeld

 

As if they were not men,
amphibious, gill-like, with 
wings, as if they were
sunning on the rocks, in a 
new day, with their flickered
lizard tongues, as if they were
tiny and biting and black,
as if I was a hero or they were,
as if the they and these us that
arrived, out of the same blue
ground bogs, as if from my
bog that I saw the sun and
swam up to the surface, as if
the surface was shining, like a
lizard to embrace, as if the
random pain of lizard heads
on sticks were prettier to eat,
as if I didn’t kill the plants, the
water, and the air, as if the
fruit and the sheep were all
diamond shaped and melted,
allowing in the sun, underground,
crowned, in shadows, in the
main dust, from the self same
main dust spring.

Kasey comments on a new anthology of 20th-century American poetics.

Ron Silliman's claim that the "us vs them", the postmod vs. premod, or, in his terms, Quietude vs Post-Avant, clash is a fact of (literary) history, does not tell us much about its actual importance. Teams of dogmatists & partisans, in the various realms of human foolishness, can often be found bickering about things for which neither side actually has a real affinity.

Aggressive literary partisans and polemicists obscure the fact that a living role for poetry in a culture (just as in the case of science or philosophy or religion or economics or politics) is bound up with a set of deep and substantial and sometimes deceptively simple questions, which every culture addresses in the process of historical change. Any good general literary history - of poetry in English, say - makes this crystal clear. Poets "represent" both general-cultural and individual responses to these questions.

The polemicists will stridently claim that it is precisely because of the seriousness with which they take these larger questions, that they are able to distinguish the good from the bad, the new from the old hat, etc. But poets themselves are usually not so aggressive : they are too busy grappling, in their poems, with the unanswered questions per se. & the partisans assiduously avoid the fact that good poetry, and its reading public, do not need their help in sorting these cultural questions into pat categorical pigeonholes & critical cliches.

some comments on Silliman's WCW etc. over at Hotel Point. "Form is finite, structure is infinite." (Charles Wright) I like that.

34. Imagine two similar oblogs (I have a cold) or ellipses, intersecting at points A & B. Let us call them oblogs O and 0 (zero). Let us let oblog O represent "poetry", and oblog 0, "poetics". Color in the intersecting area (a muted colorado or vermilion will do well; your choice), and call this area Q. Now apply your Ziescchen microscope so that the focal area corresponds to the center portion of area Q. Look closely. You will see, standing there at approximate lat/long 35'/18', with one hand in a gray raincoat & the other clutching his pipe, none other than - Friedrich Hinkel, Prof. Emeritus.

Classic oppositional poetics statement by Ange Mlinko over at Ron's blog today.

O Buffalo, O Brown, O little clubhouses everywhere!

Oppositionalism is simply politics. It's motivated by a political desire to feel important, relevant to something larger than oneself, empowered; you could translate these attitudes into ANY professional field of endeavor and apply them seamlessly. Ironically, the us/them divide merely allows "us" to wallow in complacency, to create whole idioms & theoretical systems to support "marginality" at all cost & with all hypocrisy, to disregard many techniques of social poetry simply because they turn the mode & target of address away from the clique itself.

Ange Mlinko plays these themes on a simple oaten flute; Ron Silliman with full orchestra & pipe organ.

But this junk is not even worth talking about. I'm sure it will be turned into blog-hash for days now.

That young Ron in the 60s would see publication by a trade publisher of a book by Joe Ceravolo as evidence of some kind of cultural conspiracy seems paradigmatic for his later perspectives (the Manichean divide between Quietude & Carpitude, the war between NY School & Langpo, etc). It also seems inevitable given the mental constellation of "New American Poetry" : an approach which ab ovo shapes its poets as in struggle. No one is simply an American poet : one is a "NEW American poet, battling conformism, neglect, establishment poetics, and world politico-economic Evil". Maybe the effects are analogous to the way partisan loyalties obscure democracy per se.

Good blog-in by Ron today. Food for thought. The scramble for authority among different New American Poetry mullahs in 60s & 70s. Like a sport with fans & partisans. How can anybody write under these conditions? The desperate search for the right model among young wannabes. "Projectionism" should be the name for it. But of course it was exciting.

One of the best environments for poetry I ever encountered was a small group of poets who met off & on for a couple of years at Sylvia Moubayed's house in Providence. Edwin Honig, several local poets. It was not exactly a workshop; more like a round table. We'd take turns reading new poems & then comment on them. It wasn't perfect; but it was healthy. The poem is a toy, a self-contained work of art, an effort : it is symbiotic & inalienable both from the living poet who stands there & presents it, and also inalienable from the sympathetic, engaged, critical audience which listens & responds. The poem may have a history & a set of poetic choices & a projected ambition - but these remain in the background when it goes forth & has to stand up for itself & justify itself artistically in the presence of others.

Ron's the Pope of the School of Carpitude. Always griping, always canonizing.

Draw a large circle of 132" diameter. Call it "X", or "Fame & Influence". Place all poets published by standard presses, receptors of standard awards, etc. in this circle. On the perimeter of this circle draw a small circle, "Y", called "Sub-Fame & Opposition". Place all poets not published by standard presses, not recipients of standard awards, etc. in this circle.

Place yourself in the center of circle "Y". As loud as possible, begin grousing about circle "X". Create a Heroic Historical Narrative of circle "Y", which endows its poets with Moral & Political Authority & General Romantic Sexiness & Youthful Radical Originality & Cool Tattoos & the Elixir of Eternal Youth & Alternative Canonicity & Total Post-Avant-Garde Credentials. Turn Circle "X" into the Foil or Shadow of Circle "Y", allowing the latter to Shine with all the more Brilliance in the eyes of your Alternative Post-Avant Oppositional Morally Superior Aesthetically Savvy Subculture. Hubba hubba.

O grinding binaries of Carpitude!

What's the positive term for "quietude" (Ron's diss) ?

Harmony ? Reading Bloom : he says (after Plato) that poetry emerges when reason enters music. He writes much about the relations between reason, passion, faith.

Or maybe : equanimity ?

Monsieur Silliman ecrit :

"I've sometimes wondered if the ease with which the first generation New York School connected with New York trade publishers wasn't simply an accident of proximity, but also occurred at least in part because the NY School, at least until Mr. Berrigan showed up - and this really is Ted's great contribution to this tendency - did not challenge the paradigm that American poetics was a tributary of British letters, a paradigm that has been central to all variants of the school of quietude."

I wisht I could draw a flow chart for M. Silliman's stereotype-construction house of canards. It would start with some tweedy quietudinous Brit guy like Larkin emitting quietude rays from under his olde British Library deske, stunning all them well-published quietoads like the oily NY School into sleepy success & fame, until Mr. Berrigan clump along & mud his GRREAT Contribution, swingin Americoid poesie back into its rumbustious Americoke raw uncooked redskin rebbolushionerry tuff cookies that we really are deep down. Down wid School of Quietude ! Down wid NY Pebbleshires ! Up wid US !

I don't think Ron Silliman quite understands the H.D. poem, though I'm glad he pointed to it.

He overstates & overrates both the fury & the personal.

I see the poem as a balance, a conjunction of opposing forces. The poet is contemplating the contrast between the furious moralism of the Greeks (this woman betrayed her Greek husband for a Trojan & "caused" the 10-yr war) - a kind of ugly moralism - & the physical beauty of Helen - a kind of amoral beauty. These opposites form a tragic "bind", which the Greeks would like to resolve by putting her in the grave, and which Helen defies by her continuing presence - IN THE POEM ITSELF. By becoming a container of the beautiful, the poem then takes on a contemporary resonance, a kind of implicit attack on American philistine moralism. So it circles around on its pivot of balanced opposites.

Ron recognizes what he calls the "controlled" fury here - but (oddly for a Language poet!) he turns it into an occasion for speculating on the emotions & biography of the poet. I don't think that's the issue - I don't think H.D. is expressing her "fury" - she's expressing a tragic sense of life - & the agon - the "bind" - which motivates the uncanny charisma, the fascination, of works of art. Yes, of course we can always extrapolate personal aspects - but I think too often they are over-emphasized. Critics run to explain WHAT H.D. must have been furious about - something in her personal life, some social injustice - & by rationalizing the poem they only continue the philistine process of dismissing, marginalizing, & missing its IRRATIONAL (or supra-rational or inexplicable) beauty.

Stubborn Grew is, among other things, a populist poem with quite a bit of direct political commentary. Kent Johnson, Ron Silliman, Eliot Weinberger, et al. are busy burbling about the political content of post-langpo blah blah blah.

My book has never been reviewed (nada, Nada).

Boy, Ron Silliman tries to cover a lot of polemical-poetical turf in his post of today (March 14). I don't have time to write a dissertation : I may be on strike in a couple hours, God forbid. Just a few angelically odd responses.

The situation of the anti-war reading in Amherst, so overdetermined ! Here is an event where poetry is already being put to immediate political tasks. Ron questions the wisdom of excluding a poem which because of its obscurity or "difficulty" came across as irrelevant to the purpose of the reading. So Ron is saying that the excluders, by being political in a local sense, were being a-political (allied to the "school of quietude") in a larger sense.

In order to ratify avant-garde radical credentials, as I pointed out in the early days of this blog, an oppositional, us vs. them scenario must always be invoked.

I may be on strike in a few hours so I must keep this brief.

Ron makes his stand on the "difficulty" front. There are conformist anti-intellectual forces which constantly dumb down & standardize & gentilify. This is a hoary a-g argument, actually, easily applicable to all times & places.

What Ron et al. always evade is the fact that there are strictly aesthetic values &/or techniques, which may certainly involve complex highly-difficult feats of compositional synthesis, but which may energetically reach out to the reader with a conceptually clear & articulate & transparent & engaging surface : "deceptively simple", or layered with depth. & by the same token, obscurity & difficulty are not ALWAYS the ticket to aesthetic value or authenticity. Ron wants always to romanticize the odd & the marginal, & in doing so he presents his own stereotypical notion of the audience : that great American audience open to any old kind of quirkiness from "Leaving the Atocha Station" to Jerry Rubin to Seinfeld blah blah blah. Somehow critical distinctions & aesthetic values get blurred when you start blending all the arts with culture in general. The particular values getting blurred here have little to do with the binary politicized polemic of the oppositional school of poetics. The poetry of description, cognition, articulation, communication, & rhetoric need not highlight its elliptical or markedly marginal status - confirming the stereotype of the postmodern "artist" - in order to be effective as poetry.

ARS EST CELARE ARTEM
[art is to hide art]

I remember carrying on these same arguments on the Buff List years ago, with the same people. The outsiders also have their "outside". You Are Here.

I myself am not that ideal critic, of course.
Ron is more responsive than I am:
I can't read the stuff most of the time, it makes me feel sick.
Give me an old Eric Ambler pulp any day.
I'm just another glib pretentious poet, and this is my blog, hgpoetics.

No, Ron Silliman, you cannot purvey Great New Poetry to me every three days. I don't buy your economy of millions of Great Poets kept down by a conspiracy of mainstream schools of quietude. I don't care if it's impossible to read everything being published. A critic can have standards even if the view is restricted.

There is something to be said for running the gauntlet of mainstream publication : it enforces necessary solitude & purpose.

The standard may be something finicky & whimsical on the surface. But it will allow the poet time to win the critic over despite the strictest judgement.

Even if poetry is blooming everywhere, I still want the critic to find it rare, profound, substantial, absolutely convincing. I want the critic to be tough to win over, knowledgeable, sensible, responsive.

I want poetry to go & hide somewhere, in some old abandoned shack in Hungary maybe, to get away from all these glib, pretentious poets.

This gets back to Jordan's comment about the "yucky" feeling of doing reviews.

Some comments on Ron Silliman's remarks today (2/27), on Brian Kim Stefan's "Creep" theory.

Ron has a frame for everything, which if I might oversimplify, goes something like this :

There is a community in opposition to mainstream capitalist-controlled society. There is an avant-garde, oppositional poetry & poetics community which stems from & represents this wider community. There is no alternative to membership in this community : anyone who claims otherwise is either a dupe or a sellout. Language Poetry is the classic manifestation of this oppositional community. The younger generations have so far failed to meet its standards, either because they do not recognize the L-Po techniques which they themselves have imitated, or because they are tempted into apostasy by the wider capitalist "serial publication" culture. ["Rugged"] Individualism in this context is false consciousness, a joke.

Maybe an important thing to recognize in this constellation of ideas is that for Ron, thinking about this political community or this alternative culture is a creative activity in itself, and poetry is an outgrowth from this activity rather than something with its own independent center & sphere. & while my first impulse is to try to debunk this whole intellectual constellation as a tautology, a mental prison-house, I have to recognize a strange parallel to the concept of "tradition", or the main line of development in world poetry, which I proposed as the real (though denied) context within which oppositional poetries happen. They are both framing concepts.

I guess the reason I feel more confident in my own concept is that the frame is still poetry per se; also as I have tried to sketch it out, my concept of tradition is fairly open-ended. That is, I don't propose a set of particular works or styles as "the tradition", but the idea of poetry as a global, characteristic, distinct ACTIVITY, which re-arranges the relations between past & present, history and Now.

And the basic error of Ron's concept is that he has imposed one distinct activity (political philosophy) on another distinct activity (poetry), the former providing a kind of control function. Of course, both poetry and philosophy stem from the same source, human creativity, so it's possible to design all kinds of bridging perceptions & vocabularies & judgements - this is the substance of this kind of intellection, Ron's actual creative-critical activity. The problem appears when we recognize that there are a variety of political philosophies, rather than a single one, and a variety of poetries : so that the bridge-making from ONE philosophical community to absorb one acceptable poetry is inherently partisan. In Ron's case it proceeds to a series of polemic oppositions between a capitalist-individualist-market-driven Mainstream on the one hand, and the righteous community of oppositional poets on the other. & his comments on post-lang-po generations exhibit a bemused confusion about why all these youngsters don't fall more solidly & appropriately into his constructed camps.

It seems useful to me to go straight to the perception that for Ron is most taboo : the poet as individual Person. The Person develops distinct notions & attitudes which sometimes get verbalized or crystallized in philosophical beliefs or political opinions; the Person who may also be a poet approaches the distinct activity of making poetry from a similarly unique & individual perspective. Sometimes through the miracle of communication & shared beliefs & common needs, communities form & collaborative work is accomplished; books are edited & published, poems shared, cathedrals are built. We can argue about the status of individuality & consciousness until the sun goes down; but I for one will always tend toward recognizing the inimitable uniqueness, difference, particularity of each thing among species & groups & abstractions. It's how the poem differentiates itself that it comes out of the shadow of its predecessors & the gene-pool of those that have gone before.

Ron Silliman's give and take with Rodney Koeneke on the question of the unconscious & religion in contemporary poetry. Some thoughts from me on this can be found in the interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket.

The recent NY Times feature on Anthony Hecht produced an interesting confluence of responses (see these blogs: Lime Tree, Ineluctable Maps, Mike Snider's, and the discussion on form & avant-garde on the Poetryetc. list).

Hecht's question, "what makes it a poem?" - as he sits hieratically in his white-columned library in Washington DC with the mausoleum-like inscription from one of his own funereal poems written in gold around the walls - comes like the sphinx or the voice from the crypt, asking the style question that no one has been able to answer for the last 50 years or so. "I thought of a butterfly. . ."

For the New American Poets & their inheritors, the question to some degree has already been answered. Poetry has been ineluctably democratized. See Ron Silliman's blog entry for today: the exciting question is not "what makes it a poem?", but, "How will the irrevocable advance made by the New Americans grow and diversify?" This is a rather sanguine, untroubled outlook - avoiding the issue I raised earlier on this blog, that the various "oppositional" styles in US poetry tend toward fracture and balkanization, because they are predicated on denying the existence of a central, major tradition in poetry in English. Stevens: "How to confront the mickey mockers. . . What wine does one drink, what bread does one eat?" (I don't have the book handy - hope I have those lines correct.)

I don't have the answer to any of these questions. But this morning my thoughts are ambling toward a recognition that each poet's work, each poet's poetics, represents a way of apprehending and responding to the world. Often the surface tensions & trumpetings of group developments seem to provide the fascination, the critical handle on "progress in the arts"; but maybe we could look at these matters through a slightly different lens. Say, for example, we took what we consider the elements of style & form & various poetry traditions, and instead of looking at them in some sort of comparative, historical context, looked more closely at how individual poets were able to apply particular formal elements to achieve their own individual ends.

Thus, instead of looking at Hecht, just for one example, as a role-model or exemplar of a particular style-force in poetics - what if we examined very specific formal approaches & techniques used by poets like Hecht, and then looked at how they were used by other, very different poets, poets who do not represent the para-political aspects of New Formalism. I think we would find that there are poets out there who would fall into the "progressive, experimental" pigeonholes, who are nevertheless able to apply traditional techniques (rhyme, meter, stanzas, modal forms, allusion/imitation, and so on). The nonce forms developed by "experimentalists" might not be to the taste of the nostalgic conservatives like Hecht, yet the actual techniques used by both may not be that far apart.

Kasey Mohammad emphasizes how Hecht's biases seem to stem from an inability to imagine or respond, in poetry, outside the traditional & sanctioned forms of old. It's an "archival" approach. Yet I think we have to recognize our own limits in turn. The old geezers have a background in metrics & oral presentation, coming in large part from poets like Yeats & Hardy, through Auden, Merrill et al., which if they could respond to the world-view, might teach the younger generation a number of things about the unity of relations between style, rhetoric, subject-matter, and presentation. Somewhere in that unity of effect, it seems to me, lies the direction of the central, major tradition - not the much-maligned "mainstream" - which the representatives of oppositional poetics too often complacently dismiss.

Ultimately, the arena of the new lies paradoxically with the individual - the individual poet's ability to synthesize many impulses, techniques and verbal capacities, to correlate them all in the service of a worldview and an inimitable expressive force.

Here's what happens with US oppositional poetics: see Ron Silliman's blog entry for 26 December 2002, where he suggests there is a kind of deliberate bad writing, a tactical dumbing-down, in mainstream poetry, exemplified by a sample Billy Collins poem. Contrast that blog entry with his extravagant praise for Lyn Hejinian in blog entries for today (1/3/03) and yesterday. Silliman sort of deifies Hejinian's formal maneuvers (37 chapters of 37 sentences; later edition with 8 new sentences added to each chapter), as though she were some kind of Chinese Empress carving out, pioneering, with a geometrical literary augury, a new literary space. It's an exaltation of formalism which establishes the border between mainstream & oppositional, codifying the boundaries of the new village.

This maneuver is only made possible by the denial of tradition-at-large, the Eliotic paradigm, which I described in the email to Kasey Mohammad earlier today. The vaunting of Hejinian's simple but ritualized numbering technique exemplifies the American originary pretense - which, in the context of an awareness of the complex numerology of ancient, medieval & Renaissance poetics, looks like a deliberate dumbing-down too. I believe, however, that this is NOT the case: I don't think for a moment that either Hejinian or Silliman are trying to pretend that they invented numerical formalism. I just think that by the late 20th century, US poetry balkanism necessitated the reinvention of simple wheels for small village life.